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Winner of the 1994 Lamont Poetry selection of The Academy of American Poets. "Kelly has a talent for coaxing out the world's ghosts and then fixing them in personal landscapes of fear and uncertainty.... Smoothed by nuances of sound and rhythm, her poems exude an ambiguous wisdom, an acceptance of the sad magic that returns us constantly to the lives we might have led."--Library Journal

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Brigit Pegeen Kelly has published three books of poetry, To the Place of Trumpets (Yale University Press, 1988), selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, Song (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1995), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and, The Orchard a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Additional awards and honors include a "Discovery" / The Nation award, the Witter Bynner Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council. In 2008, Brigit Pegeen Kelly was awarded the 2008 Academy Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and literary magazines, including The Nation, The Yale Review, New England Review, Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, five Pushcart Prize volumes, and six volumes of The Best American Poetry. Kelly, who has taught for many years primarily at the University of Illinois, has also taught at the University of California at Irvine, Purdue University, Warren Wilson College, and numerous writers' conferences. In 2002 the University of Illinois awarded her both humanities and campus-wide awards for excellence in teaching.

Certainty is a behemoth. It is like having a marble statue reside in your chest. It is like reading Brigit Pegeen Kelly's Song, which itself is like a lump sum of certainty. Try putting a lead weight around every image in a poem. Try making your voice sound like a lead weight. The result is authority, and in Kelly's poems it's an authority threading through and gravitating the poems. Was there a dead goat? Yes. Did the goat's head find its body? Yes. Was there a dead doe? Was there the statue of a cherub, whose little arc of pee feeds a fountain, who would sing? Yes. Yes. Yes! Kelly's speaker is like cement boots, and cement shoes worn over those boots, absolutely certain that these images and events are, and they were, and they will keep being true. Kelly's poem feel as though they happen in a reality that was foretold by a dream--a dream whose inevitability was never questioned. For instance, her poem "The White Pilgrim: Old Christian Cemetery" has a speaker who visits a cemetery. Later, she dreams the cemetery is vandalized. Six months later it is vandalized. Even time cannot escape Kelly's authorial voice. Time, be tamed!

And yet, it is when Kelly stirs up that certainty, sometimes even undermining it, that the poems reveal their complexity. Birds burst out of a tree, and that ruptures the tree. The statue of a cherub stands at the fountain, solid as marble, and yet he questions his existence compared to other boys. Contemporary poems often delight in a reality that resembles a frayed edge, with the circumstances continually unraveling or reraveling. The poet steps into that world and notices on the reader's behalf. For instance, the Dean Young poem, where anything can happen, and Young makes it fun to not know for certain why any of it happened. With Brigit Pegeen Kelly, the world is a solid thing. Consider the Greek philosopher Parmenides, who believed the world was a solid One. Pegeen makes the idea of the One feel plausible. There is a sensibility in the poems, their thorough tone, their repetition, their subject, the reader feels he has been lodged inside that One. But with the same force that brings this One about, Kelly also stirs questions about whether this One should be just One. For instance, the island in "Distraction of Fish and Flowers in the Kill" exists as a fact, populated by many facts. A beach. The fireweed. A boy who is burning ants. People who fish the kills. But inside this very certain world lives a speaker who seems uncertain of her sanity or peace, and even more uncertain of whether she should do something about it. This kind of paradox is continually lurking below the otherwise certain states in Kelly's poems.

It is the dark water. It is the color yellow. It is the poplar tree from "Three Cows and the Moon." The tree was felled by a hurricane, but for two springs the branches bloomed. The poems of Song are at all times an accomplishment and a dark extravagance. They might fool you into thinking them immutable objects. They are not. They are seething, living organisms.

I think that one of Kelly's desires is to recreate a world where everything is loaded with emotional and spiritual meaning. Where everything can be taken as a sign, as it once was, when words were considered to be magic. The title poem, Song, is about a pet goat that is killed by some boys. It is told in a parable style in which the fact of the killing is hidden from the goat's owner, but dreams and the separation of the head from the body of the goat are linked by a song that soon comes to pervade the poem.This poem can be taken as an instruction manual on how to read the poems in the collection: they'll be linked, there is a layering of meanings, there is a thread of religious concern throughout, and flight, song, and a sort of seeking grace will play roles. There is also a voice that speaks every once in a while in italics. It is never made clear who this voice is, but in places it seems like a biblical voice (I know your works . . . . God's eyes are like/A flame of fire..." in The White Pilgrim: Old Christian Cemetery (52). Kelly reminds me of the darkness that lies behind our thoughts of the divine, behind animals treated like pets, and the darkness of a night full of unnamable things. She believes that this is part of what it is to be human, to be full of paradox; to be protector, creator, mother, and at the same time, killer and consumer. When darkness falls in the poem, Kelly recaptures some of the fascination and fear we have for darkness. Example: Pg 81-82 "The trees get bigger..." i would like to say this this book is packed full of so many things that this doesn't even scrape the surface. if you are interested in good poetry that will test your boundaries this book is definitely going to do it.

Brigit Kelly's title poem is, truly, the best poem I have ever read. It is so filled with suffering and sweetness, interwoven, I could hardly stand it; it blew my mind. The entire book is wonderful. Kelly's poems radiate intelligence and bare-bones honesty. She dives into the pain and truth and loveliness of life and takes you along with her, but even with all the intensity in her writing, she leaves you feeling somehow safe in the world. If you can find her first book somewhere (it's out of print) find it, too. It also cuts to the quick. Please, Brigit, give us another book!